PRESS RELEASE: BeeKeeperAI Spins Out of UCSF to Accelerate Healthcare AI Development with Privacy-Preserving Technology Innovation

BeeKeeperAI enters a new phase of growth as an independent company focused on enabling secure collaborations between data stewards and algorithm developers

SAN FRANCISCO – April 26, 2022 – BeeKeeperAI, the pioneer in zero-trust, confidential computing and privacy preserving analytics for the training, validation, and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, today announced a critical milestone as it completed licensing of its core technology from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where it was developed in UCSF’s Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI). The company also announced that Michael Blum, MD, UCSF’s Associate Vice Chancellor for Informatics and Chief Digital Transformation Officer, will be taking a leave of absence from UCSF to lead BeeKeeperAI and become the founding Chief Executive Officer.

By uncovering novel insights across vast amounts of data, AI promises to help healthcare providers improve patient care, increase efficiency, decrease errors, and reduce costs. However, AI development in healthcare is lagging, primarily because of challenges accessing high quality, diverse data due to privacy and security concerns of the data stewards. BeeKeeperAI resolves these concerns and eliminates the complexity, high costs, and IP risk faced by algorithm developers, who are trying to access high-quality, real-world data at the scale and form needed to develop and deploy generalizable AI solutions.   

The BeeKeeperAI platform allows data stewards to keep their sensitive data in their HIPAA compliant cloud environment while still pursuing their mission to advance healthcare discovery and delivery. The platform allows algorithm developers to bring their models into a federated selection of data stewards’ HIPAA compliant cloud environments to run against encrypted data within a secure computing enclave. Processing within the secure enclave guarantees that AI developers cannot see the data, and the data stewards cannot discover the algorithm’s intellectual property. BeeKeeperAI ensures that the computational results (e.g., confidential algorithm performance report, model performance, inferences, etc) adhere to the confidentiality requirements specified by the algorithm developer and data steward.  

“BeeKeeperAI was born out of our commitment to improve the quality and pace of healthcare AI development and deployment. Even within UCSF, we lived first-hand the challenge of accessing high-quality clinical data. We knew from CDHI’s AI development work with industry that lack of access to high quality, diverse data sets was a critical, costly barrier to AI innovation,” said Dr. Blum. “At the same time, as the Chair of the IT Security committee at UCSF, I developed a deep appreciation for the need to secure our data while making it available to advance the mission of the organization.”

Joining Dr. Blum as the founding management team are: 

Mary Beth Chalk, Chief Commercial Officer, Co-founder, and former head of Business Development at CDHI 

Bob Rogers, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer, Co-founder, and former Expert in Residence at CDHI and Chief Data Scientist in the Data Center Group at Intel

The founders will be joined by three industry experts to complete the management team.

They include: 

Alan Czeszynski, Vice President, Product and former Vice President, Product Operations at NeuroVision Imaging

Sudish Mogli, Vice President, Engineering and former Chief Technology Officer at Healthcare Triangle, Inc.

Paul King, Chief Trust & Security Officer and former Director of Threat Intelligence at Cisco and Chief Security Officer for Cisco UK

BeeKeeperAI architects security into the foundation of the platform – not as an afterthought – providing protection that eliminates the need for implicit trust while providing continuous validation at every stage of a digital interaction. This facilitates secure, sightless computing on protected health information (PHI). Using BeeKeeperAI’s privacy-preserving collaboration platform, data stewards can pursue their mission of improving patient care through research and discovery without sharing patient data or risk exposing PHI. Algorithm developers can securely train and validate their algorithms without worrying about the security of their intellectual property. Patients’ privacy is always maintained.   

“BeeKeeperAI is looking forward to expanding our collaborations with AI developers and data stewards to accelerate digital healthcare innovation,” said Ms. Chalk. “For algorithm owners, BeeKeeperAI is reducing the complexity, time, and cost of developing clinically valuable, generalizable AI. For data stewards, BeeKeeperAI provides cloud infrastructure that allows them to securely and privately enable algorithm developers to compute against their encrypted data. For providers and patients, BeeKeeperAI is helping to accelerate the availability of innovative AI-powered technologies that will help to improve outcomes and lower the cost of care.”

The concept for the BeeKeeperAI platform was fostered within CDHI, which has a distinguished history of successfully developing AI technologies, including the first-ever FDA-cleared, AI-powered chest x-ray suite. By incubating BeeKeeperAI within CDHI, the founding team had direct access to a variety of experts in data science, clinical informatics, medical care, product development, and data stewardship. Early efforts included extensive market fit testing that led to a robust pipeline of initial data stewards and algorithm developers.

“CDHI enables innovations from within UCSF to pursue the early, critical technology and product development work necessary to impact real-world clinical settings, leading to companies like BeeKeeperAI,” said Aaron Neinstein, MD, Vice President of Digital Health at UCSF Health. “The BeeKeeperAI platform is an exciting new model for enabling privacy-preserving data access and for utilizing confidential computing in a novel way. BeeKeeperAI will help define the next decade of innovation in healthcare AI and beyond, and we are proud that its roots are in CDHI.”

A preview release of the BeeKeeperAI platform is currently available through an early access program for both AI developers and data stewards.  

About BeeKeeperAI

BeeKeeperAI is the pioneer in combining zero trust, confidential computing, and privacy preserving analytics for the training, validation, and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. BeeKeeperAI is accelerating the broader availability of AI-powered solutions that will help to redefine the future of healthcare.  For more information, go to beekeeperAI.com.

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Media Contact:

Anthony Petrucci

Bioscribe

anthony@bioscribe.com

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